They have our last night's bouquets, and they borrow our shawls.

They never render us a service, however slight, without seeing that they are paid twice its value.

You yourself saw when Prudence brought me the six thousand francs that I had asked her to get from the duke, how she borrowed five hundred francs, which she will never pay me back, or which she will pay me in hats, which will never be taken out of their boxes.
"We can not, then, have, or rather I can not have more than one possible kind of happiness, and this is, sad as I sometimes am, suffering as I always am, to find a man superior enough not to ask questions about my life, and to be the lover of my impressions rather than of my body.
Such a man I found in the duke; but the duke is old, and old age neither protects nor consoles.

I thought I could accept the life which he offered me; but what would you have?
I was dying of ennui, and if one is bound to be consumed, it is as well to throw oneself into the flames as to be asphyxiated with charcoal.
"Then I met you, young, ardent, happy, and I tried to make you the man I had longed for in my noisy solitude.

What I loved in you was not the man who was, but the man who was going to be.